The present disclosure relates to spot welding electrode housing apparatuses where an electrode for spot welding in, for example, automobile production lines is housed so as to be mountable to a shank end of a welding gun.
Conventionally, in automobile production lines, plural press molded products are joined by spot welding to assemble a vehicle body, and the spot welding is performed using a welding gun held by an industrial robot.
An electrode mounted on a shank end of a welding gun is worn out due to repeating spot welding, and therefore, the electrode has to be periodically exchanged for another one. Therefore, in an exchange of an electrode for another one, in order to efficiently mount the electrode on a welding gun, for example, a spot welding electrode housing apparatus as disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2010-172913 is installed in an automobile production line.
The spot welding electrode housing apparatus includes a disk-shaped rotating plate having a vertical rotation axis, and the outer circumferential surface of the rotating plate is provided with a plurality of outwardly protruding portions in the circumferential direction. In the rotating plate, a plurality of first upwardly opening recesses and second downwardly opening recesses are provided around the rotation axis, and electrodes are inserted into the first and second recesses from the respective end sides of the electrodes, thereby housing and holding the electrodes. A sliding plate which is tangentially slidable relative to the rotating plate is provided outside the rotating plate. A pair of the electrodes inserted and held at a corresponding pair of the first and second recesses at a mount position of electrodes are mounted on a shank end of a welding gun, and after the electrodes are taken out of the recesses, the sliding plate is pushed toward one direction by the shank end of the welding gun to catch a step lever, attached to the sliding plate, on one of the protruding portions, whereby the rotating plate is rotated until another pair of the first and second recesses adjacent to the first and second recesses out of which the electrodes have been taken are at the mount position of electrodes to allow another pair of the electrodes to be in the standby state for mounting.